Federal legal guidelines defend voting rights for folks with disabilities, however many individuals with disabilities expertise boundaries to voting, resulting in decrease voting charges.
After the November 2022 midterm elections, the Election Help Fee (EAC) estimated that if voters with disabilities had voted on the similar charges as voters with out disabilities, there can be round 2 million extra votes forged. The EAC additionally discovered that individuals with disabilities voted at a 3.6 % decrease charge than folks with out disabilities, although that quantity narrowed to 1.5 % after being adjusted with up to date Census knowledge.
Accessibility issues each in individual and on-line. As an official authorities supply of voting data, vote.gov helps voters with disabilities know that their voting rights are protected by regulation. And it makes them conscious of lodging accessible to assist them register and vote.
Along with offering details about learn how to vote, we’re additionally actively bettering vote.gov’s web site design to ensure it’s as accessible as attainable. This consists of display reader compatibility, high-contrast designs, and plain language. Right here’s how we’ve completed this up to now.
Our group conducts accessibility testing on all vote.gov net pages earlier than we roll out new content material. This helps us ensure every web page is suitable with zoom magnification, keyboards, and display readers. We additionally added an HTML sitemap to permit for a number of strategies of navigation to numerous net pages on vote.gov.
To enhance the accessibility of the Nationwide Mail Voter Registration Kind, we partnered with the EAC to construct a digital kind filler instrument. Voters will have the ability to choose their state and get the particular directions they want based mostly on their state. This streamlines over 20 pages of directions from the unique PDF registration kind. The digital kind filler instrument will likely be mobile-friendly and supply a greater display reader expertise. We plan to launch the instrument on vote.gov within the coming months.
We’ve labored with incapacity advocacy teams representing a number of varieties of circumstances (restricted imaginative and prescient, cognitive disabilities, and extra) and built-in their suggestions. And we partnered with the World Providers for the Blind to recruit 10 analysis contributors for 30-45 minute cellphone and video periods targeted on the readability and usefulness of vote.gov content material.
In case you are disabled and/or use assistive expertise and wish to share suggestions about your expertise utilizing the vote.gov web site, you may join utilizing this way.
It’s vital to us that individuals are conscious of vote.gov’s dedication to accessibility and have a approach to share their suggestions. To that finish, we:
- Developed an accessibility assertion that’s distinctive to vote.gov and descriptions our dedication to creating vote.gov accessible to folks of all talents
- Provide a 508 e mail contact for the vote.gov group: section508-vote@gsa.gov
- Present the web site suggestions kind in English and Spanish
Whereas we’re happy with our progress up to now, the work is way from full. Right here’s what else is within the pipeline:
- We’re conducting extra usability testing with individuals who have situational limitations (restricted entry to the web, rural residents, and so forth.) and bodily and cognitive disabilities.
- We’re engaged on a show toggle to ensure folks with low imaginative and prescient and different circumstances can customise their view of vote.gov by enlarging the textual content and/or altering the distinction. This characteristic got here straight from person suggestions from the Heart for Civic Design.
- Analysis tells us voting phrases may be complicated. We’re workshopping methods so as to add definitions on our pages to make it simpler for folks to grasp difficult voting phrases and phrases (corresponding to “poll measures” and “caucus”).
- We’re testing our back-end content material administration system (CMS) for accessibility so vote.gov designers, builders, and different group members with disabilities might help contribute to the upkeep of vote.gov.
Our purpose is for all voters to have equal entry to our web site and discover details about their voting choices and rights. We’re all the time open to suggestions. Electronic mail us at section508-vote@gsa.gov if in case you have concepts we might incorporate to make vote.gov an much more accessible and inclusive expertise.
